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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc,comp.sys.next,comp.sys.mac,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: replacing the desktop metaphor (Wives)
Keywords: desktop metaphor, graphical interfaces, computing environments
Message-ID: <27265@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 28 Dec 88 17:16:28 GMT
References: <850@mtfmi.att.com> <673@cogsci.ucsd.EDU> <1489@umbc3.UMD.EDU> <22616@pbhya.PacBell.COM>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 85

In article <22616@pbhya.PacBell.COM> whh@pbhya.PacBell.COM (Wilson Heydt) writes:
>I not you typical end user--I'm a programmer.  My wife, however, writes
>(fantasy mostly).  She doesn't care how the system works--so long as it
>*does* work and doesn't get in her way.  What she likes is unix, the C
>shell, vi and nroff.  Let me note here that the reason she likes vi is
>because she is a very fast typist (>100 wpm) and she never has to take
>her hands off the keyboard--this is why she *hates* mice.  The commands
>are all normal keyboard keys (with very few exceptions) and she finds it
>very easy to use.  

How funny! My wife is also a fantasy writer, also types faster than 100
wpm, and also doesn't care how it works as long as it does. She wrote the
first draft of her first novel in vi, the second draft in WordStar, and
has long since given up both for MacWrite, saying "I'll never go back."

You don't use a mouse for typing, that is what a keyboard is for.  You use
the mouse for editing, because you can move the cursor, and select regions
faster with it than you can with key commands, even given the time to put
your hand back on the keyboard.  This advantage improves the larger you
screen is.

My wife doesn't need to use nroff, the wordprocessor does it already. 

Issac Asimov once said, "I use Electric Pencil, and it is the only word
processor I'll ever use." I asked him why, and he said, "It was so hard to
learn to use that I'm never going to waste the time to learn another one."

Maybe you should think about why you cling so tightly to the ancient vi
and nroff.

My wife also improvises music, on a sequencer program wiht the metaphor of a 64
channel tape recorder  (her tape, "Pantheon", got a rave review in the May
'88 issue of Electonic Musician.)

She also composes, using a music-score processor. she uses the mouse in
one hand to place notes on staves, and the keyboard under the other to
select which kind of note the mouse will leave.  It took her over a year
to find the buried manual page that documented the "oridinary typing key"
equivalents for the different notes, because the particularly scoring
program that she uses doesn't follow the Macintosh guidelines for being
self-documenting.  That first year, she used the mouse to click on pictures
of notes to change note values. It worked, and got her composing, but
wasn't optimal.  It would be incredibly tedious to perform this task with
a command-line based editor.

My wife says that now that she has the Macintosh, it has liberated her
artistic skills, that she is drawing when she never had been able to
before.  Books, like "Zen and the Art of the Macintosh" have given her
good ideas.  She would never have tried on a unix system.  Come to think
of it, I've never seen a book called "Zen and the Art of Unix." I wonder
why?

Some years ago, I did do a Unix Kaballistic Tree of Life, but I did it in
Bill Atkinson's drawing program LisaDraw, the ancestor of MacDraw.

My wife is now editing a bi-quarterly newsletter, doing much of the writing,
much of the art, and all of the page layout herself.  (All on the
Macintosh.)

To sum up, it isn't that character based systems are too hard to learn to
use that motivated people can't get useful work done, it is that
Macinoshes are so easy to learn to use that you discover that you are
capable of doing things you'd never bother to attempt without them.

Don't you think you owe it to yourself to at least give them a try?

----------------digression- -------
>They want 10-pitch, constant width output.  Note that this lets out most
>of the Mac standard fonts.

1.) Mac programs let you change the fonts, and fonts are widely available,
often for free, and installation is easier than installing a new font in
nroff/troff.

2.) Who are your editors?  All the submission guidlines I've read want
clean, black, double spaced copy.  non-porportional vs. porportional fonts
aren't specified anywhere. My wife's article on European Shamanism in the
current issue of "Shaman's Drum", for example was just printed using an
ordinary font.

3.) This does seem stretching for a criticism.

--- David Phillip Oster            --"When we replace the mouse with a pen,
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --3 button mouse fans will need saxophone
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --lessons." - Gasee